A Democratic Socialist Blog

Legal Cheating

The two parties seems to be able to break the rules at anytime. It has always been that way. The 2016 election is a real doozey for dishonesty. Political Parties choose a front runner. That is a form of cheating because it attempts to take away from good candidates and tell people who they should vote for. Front runners choices unethical practice of political parties.Front Runners serve a parties interests not the peoples interest. Now as Far as Hillary Clinton goes.

The first headlines out of Iowa announced a virtual tie between Democratic presidential hopefuls

Then mainstream media sites changed their tunes on Tuesday. They declared Clinton the ultimate victor – chiefly by winning a series of coin tosses.

While that’s where much of the media coverage left off, some outlets have since revealed a discrepancy in one Iowa precinct. Specifically, Sanders’ campaign sounded the alarm that the former secretary of state may have used dirty and highly irregular tactics to win the the State of Iowa.

The controversy actually started on Jan. 31 when voters from Hawarden, Iowa, received mailings from the Clinton campaign asking them to caucus for her on Monday evening. While the request itself wasn’t unusual, who it came from certainly was. These letters were written by Morgan Luther, who identified himself as the precinct captain for Hawarden. Precinct captains are responsible for gathering supporters for particular candidates at local caucuses, and they are chosen from among local residents.

However, Luther was chosen by Clinton’s campaign — and he is not a resident of Hawarden.

In fact, Luther is not even a resident of Iowa.

Before the caucuses took place, the Sanders campaign said the letter raised suspicions that these out-of-state staffers might actually be counted as caucus voters. Both Democratic hopefuls employ out-of-state staffers in their campaigns, reported Yahoo! News on Jan. 31, but Sanders did not insert paid, non-local staff into official caucus roles.

Rules set out by Univision before last night’s debate in Miami state that candidates are not allowed to converse with campaign officials during commercial breaks.
However, because the protocol is established by the television network, rather than an official government body, it is unclear what – if any – penalty exists for violating the rules.

“This is a call for the immediate arrest of President Bill Clinton for clear, knowing and egregious violation of the campaign laws to swing an election in a significant way,” the petition states.

Despite being “told to refrain from this activity,” the petition’s author argues, photos and video show Clinton campaigning for his wife just outside the polling station.

According to Massachusetts election law, “No person shall solicit votes for or against, or otherwise promote or oppose, any person or political party or position on a ballot question, to be voted on at the current election… within 150 feet of a polling place.”
Reports indicate Clinton visited multiple polling stations throughout the state, including in Newton and West Roxbury, where the former president was seen shaking hands with poll workers.
The question of Zelaya was anything but moot. Latin American leaders, the United Nations General Assembly and other international bodies vehemently demanded his immediate return to office. Clinton’s defiant and anti-democratic stance spurred a downward slide in U.S. relations with several Latin American countries, which has continued. It eroded the warm welcome and benefit of the doubt that even the leftist governments in region offered to the newly installed Obama administration a few months earlier.

Clinton’s false testimony is even more revealing. She reports that Zelaya was arrested amid “fears that he was preparing to circumvent the constitution and extend his term in office.” This is simply not true. As Clinton must know, when Zelaya was kidnapped by the military and flown out of the country in his pajamas on June 28, 2009, he was trying to put a consultative, nonbinding poll on the ballot to ask voters whether they wanted to have a real referendum on reforming the constitution during the scheduled election in November. It is important to note that Zelaya was not eligible to run in that election. Even if he had gotten everything he wanted, it was impossible for Zelaya to extend his term in office. But this did not stop the extreme right in Honduras and the United States from using false charges of tampering with the constitution to justify the coup.

In addition to her bold confession and Clinton’s embrace of the far-right narrative in the Honduran episode, the Latin America chapter is considerably to the right of even her own record on the region as secretary of state. This appears to be a political calculation. There is little risk of losing votes for admitting her role in making most of the hemisphere’s governments disgusted with the United States. On the other side of the equation, there are influential interest groups and significant campaign money to be raised from the right-wing Latin American lobby, including Floridian Cuban-Americans and their political fundraisers. And we wonder if the FBI will ever make arrests. Probably not.